Celebrity Economists Make Waves

By

Leslie Kwoh

Jul 3, 2013 12:14 pm ET

Who are people turning to nowadays for business advice?

Celebrity economists.

Big-name experts on the economy like Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Michael Porter, Robert Reich and Muhammad Yunus feature prominently in a new ranking of influential business thinkers compiled for The Wall Street Journal.

The findings – based on Google hits, media mentions and academic citations – show just how much the business-guru landscape has changed since 2008, when a previous ranking was conducted using similar methodology. Author and consultant Gary Hamel ranked No. 1 at the time, a spot now occupied by Krugman.

“I call the new list the invasion of the celebrity economists,” says Tom Davenport a management professor at Babson College and author of the 2003 book, “What’s the Big Idea?”

Davenport, who compiled this year’s ranking with Jeffrey Cronin, a research librarian at HBS, says business and management topics have fallen out of favor, thanks to a shortage of megatrends like Six Sigma and business process re-engineering, which swept the nation in the 1980s and 1990s. “There’s no really big topic,” he says.